Armada by Ernest Cline Read Free Book Online Page A

calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.
    A warning message flashed on Ray’s HUD: your drone has been destroyed! Then his display went dark for a second before a new message flashed on his HUD, informing him that he had just been given control of a new drone. But since all of his unit’s larger drones and tanks had already been destroyed, Ray was forced to take control of the only thing they had left. An ATHID—Armored Tactical Humanoid Infantry Drone.
    From the neck down, an ATHID looked similar to the original Terminator, after all of Arnie’s cyborg flesh got burned away, leaving only its armored chrome skeleton underneath. But in place of a human-shaped head, each ATHID had a stereoscopic camera encased inside an armored acrylic dome, giving it a vaguely insect-like appearance. Every ATHID was armed with a Gauss mini-gun mounted on each forearm, a pair of shoulder-mounted missile launchers, and a laser cannon embedded in its chest plate.
    I watched over Ray’s shoulder as he used his ATHID’s twin mini-guns to mow down an onslaught of Sobrukai Spider Fighters—eight-legged antipersonnel robots—that were attacking him on the roof of a burning tenement building, somewhere near the center of the besieged city he was helping defend. He was bobbing his head in time to his favorite TF battle soundtrack song, “Vital Signs” by Rush. Ray claimed that its unique time signature matched up perfectly with the alien Spider Fighter drones’ erratic swarming patterns, making it easier for him to anticipate their movements and rate of attack. He also claimed that each of the other songs on Rush’s Moving Pictures album was perfect for battling a different Sobrukai drone. Personally, I’d always assumed this was just an excuse he’d concocted for playing that same album on a continuous loop, day after day.
    On Ray’s monitor, dozens of Sobrukai troopships were descending from the sky. These massive, gunmetal gray octahedrons where what the enemy used to deploy their ground forces once they reached Earth’s orbit. Each one had automated sentry guns mounted all over its heavily armored hull, which was nearly invulnerable to laser fire. Of course, in typical videogame fashion, these ships had been engineered with a glaring weak spot: their engines were unshielded and vulnerable to attack—a fact I knew well from playing Armada . When one of these diamond-shaped troopships made landfall, it would impact with enough velocity to bury its lower half into the surface, like a giant spike. Then the pyramid-shaped top half would open like an enormous four-petaled metal flower, and the thousands of Sobrukai drones packed inside it would pour out, like an army of newborn insects bursting from a broken egg sac, intent on devouring everything in sight.
    In the distance, a swarm of Sobrukai Glaive Fighters streaked across the sky, banking in unison to change course, like a school of piranha in search of prey. Viewed from above, the Glaive’s symmetrical fuselage resembled the blade of a double-headed axe, but seen edge-on, its profile distinctly resembled that of a flying saucer from an old sci-fi film—a detail that had worked its way into my earlier hallucination.
    I’d destroyed countless Glaive Fighters during the three years I’d been playing Armada . Until now, I’d never found them especially frightening or ominous. But today, just seeing the background animations on Ray’s screen filled me with a sense of dread, as if the ships really were somehow a threat to everything I held dear and not a harmless collection of textured polygons rendered on a computer display.
    Ray power-leaped his ATHID off of the burning rooftop and onto the back of a Sobrukai Basilisk, a reptilian-looking robot tank with laser cannons for eyes. Ray power-jumped into the air again, spinning his